The Price of Power

Power doesn't come cheap. If it did, we'd all be living in mansions, spending our weekends sucking down margaritas on some isolated tropical beach. That isn't the way the world works, and that isn't how games should work. Now every game has different definitions of power. In fantasy games, magic is usually a good route to power. Hardware and techno-gizmos are often the surest way to power in an SF game. In this article, I'm going to draw on Orson Scott Card's Hart's Hope and Stephen Donaldson's Gap Saga for examples of how to extract the price of power from your characters.

Blood Magic

Hart's Hope, one of Orson Scott Card's earliest works, tells the tale of a young man named Orem who must overthrow the cruel Queen Beauty and restore the just and rightful king to power. I won't go into too much detail about the plot, since I'm not a big fan of Card, but he does describe the basics of a ghastly, if compelling, magic system.

In the world of Hart's Hope, magic is divided into two parts: magic for men and magic for women. Women's magic gets only passing description in Hart's Hope. It is men's magic that I am going to focus on. In order to cast a spell, you must draw blood from a living creature. So, for a simple spell, you can give yourself a small cut and gain the magical power needed for the spell. A more powerful spell may require the blood of a wild animal. The most potent magical power comes from the blood of loved ones. A wizard willing to kill his wife or his child stands to acquire massive amounts of power. Of course, only a truly heartless or diabolical fiend would do something like that. Which means that only the heartless or diabolical will have access to the most powerful magics.

I'm not going to try to boil this idea down into a game mechanic. That would dodge the basic point of this article: too many games water power down into some neat little game mechanism. A new spell or increased skill simply means that the character can now beat up bigger and badder beasties.

BOOOORING!

Imagine if your players had to sacrifice something, a stat, a magic item, their nifty new starcruiser, in order to nab that little piece of personal power. It is often said that people will value something that they have to work for. RPGs have that angle covered rather well. Most experience systems require a character to clobber x number of baddies before he can get a new skill. Well, what if we turn that system on its head? Give your characters the power they want, and then hit them with the price of that power. If they want to pull a cool stunt, its going to cost them. To get back to Hart's Hope, how attractive would magic be in your game if your players knew that they'd have to injure themselves or hurt the ones they love to use it? Such a situation breeds a respect for power and a clear understanding that if the characters want to hoist out their big guns, its going to cost them. This can generate a lot of sticky moral situations and tension between the thirst for power and the reluctance to pay its price. Instant compelling role-play fodder right there, folks!

There are a few things to keep in mind when creating a magic system like this. First, you have to make the price worth the reward. In an AD&D game, it is a little ridiculous to expect a mage to kill his first born child just to cast a magic missile! Simple spells in Hart's Hope require that the mage only draw a small amount of his own blood. The key is to keep the cost of magic on a mage's mind, no matter how simple the spell. But don't over do it.

A related guideline is to keep your magic system usable. If truly powerful magics require a mage to jump into a volcano or something, you won't find many mages using such magic often, if ever. Magic should demand a stiff price, but it should be something that a heartless or at least a dedicated character can pay.

The price of magic should also have reverberations throughout your campaign. NPCs should know what a mage has to do to gain power and react to spellcasters appropriately. If you decide that mages have to sacrifice puppies and kittens to cast spells, you can bet that most NPCs won't be too keen on mages in general. Such social isolation and stigma can lead to some great role-playing opportunities. The ideal magic system should give your game a unique flavor and added depth. It shouldn't be just a laundry list of stuff needed to cast spells.

Finally, be sure to follow through on whatever sacrifices a character makes. You should ensure that a character's decisions do not take place in a vacuum. If the player is role-playing this out, he may need some not so subtle reminders.

Cybernetics and Freewill

So far, I've talked about extracting a material cost from your characters. In most games, it will be enough to require characters to sacrifice trusted items and their personal health. If your group is up to role playing challenge, there is a very cool concept that you can steal from Stephen Donaldson's Gap saga.

In his five volume series, Donaldson tells a sprawling (and a bit long winded; I skimmed the last book and a half) tale of an interstellar struggle for power. I could write a few months' worth of columns just on this series alone, but instead I'll focus on one very cool character: Angus Thermopyle.

Angus was a space pirate, one of the most brutal and heartless men in all of space. I say "was" because at one point in the saga, Angus is captured by the authorities and turned into a cyborg, complete with laser beams in his fingers, a sophisticated suite of ECM tools, and increased strength and agility. Basically, he gets all the cool stuff out of Shadowrun.

But that's not all. Since Angus is just a bit on the murderous side, the government implants a computer in his head, a computer that controls his actions. Angus isn't reduced to a simple automaton. He still has most of his freewill. The computer kicks on in certain situations and forces him to obey the commands of selected individuals. It also controls his violent compulsions and sometimes gives him access to new data or skills (a la the Matrix).

I think that this is one of the niftiest ideas you can add to a science fiction game. Mind control like this is a natural outgrowth of cybernetic implants. If we can modify the body, why not modify the mind?

There are a lot of pitfalls to this idea. One of the most common mantras in any RPG that includes a seduction or fast-talk skill is that NPCs can't use skills like that to make PCs do things. PC freewill is inviolate. Often, I'd agree with that. A game isn't much fun if the GM is always telling you what your character is doing. But with the right players and the right plan, you can make this work in a game.

My first suggestion is that you check with your players before trying something like this out. Most gamers, I imagine, wouldn't be too keen on hearing halfway through a campaign that those implants that took at character creation have turned them into corporate lapdogs.

On the other hand, it is a good idea to keep the limits of the implants' control secret. Part of the fun of this idea is that it gives a game a hint of the unexpected. It can also worry your players to no end. You want to give your players a basic idea of what's up, but save a full explanation for an appropriately climactic scene.

Don't over do it. It is a little easy to shackle everyone with mind control devices, but it makes it a little less unique and may be problematic if not everyone is keen on losing some of their character's free will. A character coping with something like this should be the exception, not the norm.

Finally, keep the level of control over a character reasonable. Any mind control implants a character has should be there for a reason. This can be a great tool for advancing your plot and provides a lot of cool role-playing opportunities. Don't just use it as a method to browbeat or abuse characters senselessly.